Keep it private only to yourself? I do this, and never been rate limited.
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2026
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Take this with a grain of salt since I haven't done much scraping (yet; I have a project I just started planning)
I've heard you're more likely to get blocked for using a VPN since some sites will block requests originating from data centers, which is less likely to happen coming from a residential IP address. (Although if you're already using a VPS, the right proxy may help)
This might be useless advice, but it might just be best to increase (and randomize) the amount of time between requests.
And to answer your question, Mullvad is what I use, and it's what I see reccomended (from both Reddit, and The Wirecutter) the most often because they store so little of your data, and you can even pay in cash.
On the vpn/proxy idk, I think the bots would pass through it.
There are some nginx blocklists like the ultimate bad bot blocker, I could share my Cloudflare rules if you want it, as these are rules, it can be abstracted to anywhere.
Nginx also has support for rate limiting built in.
On the topic of blocking, I block useragents starting with Mozilla/5.0 that are using HTTP/1.X, since all modern browsers default to HTTP/2.0 and anything else is usually always bad bots. You can also return 426 with the Upgrade: h2c header to let some older browsers know to use HTTP/2.0.